Similar

Spanning not only the Hard Rock Hotel’s Joint, but also its “Zombie Apocalypse Room” and “Erotic Fairground,” the 2013 Fetish & Fantasy Ball offered sexy/disturbed partygoers almost twice as much space as previous years. And some costumes needed the room—like the extremely popular “X Giving Y a Blowjob” outfit (e.g., Darth Vader with a Princess Leia doll taped to his crotch, vampire with bloody human victim taped to his crotch), which, in terms of offensiveness, paled in comparison to the Sexy Nazis strutting around. (Seriously, people?)

Perhaps the peak Vegas party is one where everyone’s so gorgeous that you can’t tell the paid models from the patrons. This was the case in the Alice in Wonderland-inspired VIP room, where body-painted dancers and sexy showgirls ruled the floor. The girl dressed as Alice and the Mad Hatter accompanying her seemed not to be working the event, amazed and flattered that a whole room had seemingly been constructed specifically for them.

Outside the Zombie Apocalypse Room, I spotted a panda kissing a pirate, a team of human lampshades, a fleet of pilots and stewardesses, and a guy in a thong. That was the costume: Old Dude in a Thong. I could say he phoned it in, but there’s a group more deserving of my wrath—a group that could and should have stepped up to the plate: drag queens.

Hear me out. Drag queens should be better at Halloween than everyone else, and yet so many of them seemingly just dressed up as Normal Drag Queens. These queens weren’t guys dressing in drag for just one night. There’s a certain line that non-drag dudes are simply unwilling to cross when cross-dressing, and these queens were well past it. But they weren’t themed! It’s like getting invited to Phil Ivey’s place for a home game and him saying, “I don’t have any chips so let’s use Cheerios.”

I dressed as Gaston from Beauty and the Beast. Sounds simple enough, but when you factor in the full-body muscle suit, things get tricky. Especially when it’s time to use the restroom. Which leads me to the evening’s oddest moment: finding a giant line at the men’s room and no line at the women’s. Guess I wasn’t the only guy with a hard-to-remove costume. Perhaps this is definitive proof that in the battle of the sexes, guys won Halloween 2013.